The field of the present invention is the apparatus and method for processing dough balls and particularly concerns the apparatus and method to load dough balls for automated production of tortillas.
Tortillas can be made by hand but this is very labor intensive especially for large volume commercial production. Where tortillas are commercially produced the ball of dough which ultimately forms the tortillas is individually positioned on a flat conveyor belt. This individual positioning is also labor intensive and because of operator speed necessary for high volume, the manual individual positioning does not always provide uniform spacing between dough balls. In addition, these dough balls may roll on the conveyor belt which may result in forming overlapping non-saleable tortillas.